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Harvey Weinstein is taking a leave of absence from his own company after The New York Times released a report alleging decades of sexual harassment against women, including employees and actress Ashley Judd.

Will Bunch

STAFF COLUMNIST

Will Bunch has worked at the Daily News for 20-plus years and is now senior writer. Since 2005, he’s written the uber-opinionated, fair-but-dangerously unbalanced opinion blog "Attytood," covering a range of topics (but mostly politics and the media these days); it’s been named best blog in the state by the Associated Press Managing Editors and best blog in the city by Philadelphia Magazine. He’s also authored three full-length books and three Amazon Kindle Single e-books, including 2015’s The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream. Prior to coming to Philadelphia, he worked at New York Newsday, where he was part of a team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.

There’s an old saying in journalism about “the story that’s too good to check.” Often, that refers to an urban legend that’s more fun to believe than to disprove with a phone call or two. But the flip side of the phrase is more troubling. There are some important – yet true – stories that can’t easily be “checked” and thus don’t make it into print for years, even decades, especially when the powerful are involved. Some cowardly reporters don’t want to lose access to the rich and famous, but just as often there are intrepid journalists thwarted by a system designed to protect the elite. Sources suddenly vanish or are intimidated into not speaking on the record – followed by the arrival of high-powered lawyers threatening libel suits and complaining to reporters’ bosses.

The Times reporters were able to get some high-profile targets of this predator on the record, such as the actress Ashley Judd, who said Weinstein invited her to his hotel room for what she thought would be a business meeting only to show up in a bathrobe and ask her to massage him or watch him shower. Others told the Times they were bullied into massaging Weinstein, naked, and after the first article appeared, more women came forward to recall times when Weinstein had been physically and verbally abusive or even pleasured himself, uninvited, in their presence.

Weinstein’s repulsive behavior makes him a poster child for toxic male supremacy and a culture of entitlement and abuse that has long permeated America’s top institutions. One of the more predictable reactions over the last few days has been the efforts by almost everyone to put a partisan political spin on this. Republicans – delighted, no doubt, to change the conversation on the one-year anniversary of the leak of President Trump’s appalling Access Hollywood tape – twisted the Weinstein scandal as a broader indictment of modern liberalism, while Democrats relentlessly tried to bring the focus back to President When-You’re-A-Star-They-Let-You-Do-It.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it.” That was the piggish, sexist, dehumanizing attitude of Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein and Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes and Bill Cosby and Ted Kennedy and Rep. Tim Murphy and etc., etc., etc. Where’s the common ideology? There is none, aside from corrosive sexual politics. Maybe that’s why powerful men tend to defend themselves in a way that transcends all their other beliefs.

Weinstein and his allies hired a high-powered legal team that had every intention of killing their article, just as they’d been able to do in the past. Nevertheless, Kantor and Twohey persisted, and after months of relentless, fearless reporting, they published the truth. Despite the damning evidence, Weinstein is still threatening to sue the Times, and he’s hired the attorney who not only successfully sued the edgy and irreverent website Gawker in the Hulk Hogan case, but who successfully drove Gawker out of business, in a case which sent a chilling message to newsrooms across the country.

That Gawker lawsuit was funded by a billionaire, Peter Thiel, who didn’t like its journalism and wanted to destroy it. Take a step back and look at the big picture. The New York Times is, financially, the strongest legacy print news organization in America and can surely withstand whatever Team Weinstein might throw at it, but there are a lot more Gawkers or struggling metro newspapers that are one lost billionaire lawsuit away from insolvency. The oligarchic sharks are circling the water, and now their head shark is ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Trump’s newest anti-media tweetstorm also included that chilling threat, a call for Senate investigators to stop probing possible Trump campaign collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 election and investigate the media instead. No president in American history has been so hostile to the fundamental concept of a free press in this country. That’s because Trump knows that with a GOP Congress and now the Supreme Court in his back pocket, an independent media is the last line of defense that can hold the president accountable and halt the rise of American authoritarianism. What’s just as scary is that a lot of the rich and powerful – liberal or conservative – would like to see Trump succeed.